"I got it, boss!" he announced ecstatically. "What we gotta do wit' dis wren is catch her at de aerodrome before she takes off."
"Before she takes off what?" asked the Saint foggily.
"Before she takes off wit' de compressed whiskey," said Mr Uniatz proudly, "De stuff de temperance outfit she's woikin' for t'rows out of de aeroplanes." Mr Uniatz raised his bottle and washed out his throat with enthusiastic lavish-ness. His eyes glowed with the rapture of achievement. "Chees, boss, why didden we t'ink of dat before? It's in de bag!"
Simon looked at him for a moment; and then he bowed his head in speechless reverence.
And at that instant the telephone bell rang.
The sound jarred into the silence with a shrill unexpectedness that jolted them all into an unnatural stillness. There were many people among the Saint's large acquaintance who might have made a casual call at that hour; and yet for some illogical reason the abrupt summons gave him a queer intuitive tightening in his stomach. Perhaps it was the way his thoughts had been running. He lifted his head and looked at the faces of the others, but they were all expressionless with the same formless foreboding.
Simon picked up the phone.
"Hullo," he said.
"Is that you, Simon darling?" it answered. "This is Valerie."
A feathery tingle passed up the Saint's spine and was gone, and with it the tightness in his stomach was gone also. He could not have said exactly how he knew so much. Her voice was quite ordinary, and yet there was an indefinable tension in it that seemed to make everything quite clear. Suddenly his brain seemed to be abnormally cool and translucent.